"Amid falling sales of its bread-and-butter servers and mounting pressure on Schwartz to cut more jobs and boost a stock price that's dropped more than 22%, to USD 5.26, since early February, Sun is considering its most radical open-source move yet: releasing Solaris under the love-it-or-hate-it GPL. The move could reinvigorate Sun by putting one of its crown jewels into the thick of the open-source movement - or it could diminish the worth of one of Sun's most valuable pieces of intellectual property."

I agree about it being "late" but disagree about it being too late. More later.

Linux has reached critical mass in the desktop world and is poised to be competitive with Windows by 2010.

This kind of commentary has been made for years, replacing 2010 with X where X == random_date_in_future(). Also, Solaris isn't exactly the desktop OS of choice, regardless of license. It's a workstation/primarily server OS.

This is the helium flash before Sun goes nova.

Wow, quite the pessimist, are we? While I think Sun should have gone forward with open-source plans at an earlier point in time, I don't think it's over/done with. They still have a lot of traction in the government, and with major enterprise companies. You might be correct about the desktop - I personally don't feel UNIX (or clones) fit well as "normal people" desktop OSs - but this applies equally to Linux. I don't know where these dates keep coming from, but they are nothing more than conjecture.

If any UNIX/clone OS has a chance at being "competitive" with Windows in the future, it's OSX. The whole "has to be free" deal isn't earning Linux any friends at the moment - even if the fault lies with HW manufacturers/software manufacturers.

The one thing Solaris has going for it that Linux doesn't is relatively rigorous testing and QC. I've yet to have Solaris N+1 break on me because of bugs introduced between RC and gold releases. Can't say the same for Linux.